“I like it.”
“Of course you do.”
They smile into their cups.
“You and Brenda impress me, though. You’re both so motivated to do important things. Most of the time, I feel like an Olympian if I manage to take a shower and cook dinner. If I wasn’t married, I probably wouldn’t even bother.”
“Want to know what I did my first year? Ate takeout, slept way too much, and watched every episode of Star Trek available on Netflix. Twice. I’m pretty sure going to group once a month was the only productive thing I did all year. Well, that, and I started seeing a therapist. Which is probably why I slept so much.”
“It’s hard for me to imagine you any other way than you are today.”
“I didn’t even practice yoga that year. I didn’t give a shit about it. Not that I could even settle for long enough to meditate if I wanted to.”
“How very un-yogi of you.”
He smirks. “So, do you feel any better?”
“Maybe a little.”
They drink tea for a while and watch the snow fall.
“Can you tell me about Sequoia?” she asks. He regards her, slightly taken aback by her directness. She notes the fullness of his eyebrows she doubts have ever been tweezed. The rusty tint of his brown eyes. The occasional hairless patch in his beard of week-old scruff.
He frees his hair from its half ponytail and shakes his head a few times. “That’s a big question. What do you want to know?”
Kavita remembers something she was wondering about earlier. “Do you look alike?”
“Sort of. We’re both tall and thin. Her eyes were a lighter shade of brown. She had short spiky hair and a gold lip ring. Her hair colour changed a lot. From pink to green to purple to platinum. When she died it was dark blue.”
“What did she do?”
“She was a muralist. She liked riding her long-board around town and spotting new canvases. She loved the idea of beautifying urban spaces. Some of her work was commissioned by the city in Chinatown. Remember how I told you she was more yin than me, more of an introvert? Well, her murals were like her way of reaching out and connecting with people. I think maybe it came from being so lonely.”
“I’d love to see them sometime. What did she like to paint?”
“She had a thing for koi fish and flowers. She painted a mural in my parents’ yard along the back of our house. It’s this psychedelic koi fish, kelp forest, botanical garden composition. Kind of hard to describe. But I’m glad we have it. Whenever I go home to visit my parents, it makes me feel like she’s still around.”
“I’d love to see that someday, too.”
“Your turn,” he asks, forcing a grin. “Tell me about Sunil.”
Suddenly she can appreciate the enormity of the question. How to distill her brother into a few spare lines? How to express all he was, all he means to her, in words?
“Well, he was tall and handsome, but I’m biased. He worked with computers, although I never really understood what he did with them. Isn’t that awful? He loved reading mystery novels. Val McDermid, Lee Child, Dean Koontz, that sort of thing. I saved a box of his books before my mom sold our house. I flipped through some of them the other day. He had a habit of underlining words, the ones he liked, or maybe didn’t know and wanted to lookup. He dog-eared the bottom of pages, not the tops. Sometimes he scribbled his thoughts in the margins. There’s something about seeing his handwriting that destroys me whenever I come across it now. I cherish it, but it destroys me. Maybe because I know it’s finite. He’ll never write another word. Whatever I find, that’s it.” She pauses. With anyone else, she would have ordered herself to smile. But with Hawthorn, she knows she doesn’t have to pretend. “Where was I?” she says. “He liked ordering pizza on Fridays to celebrate the weekend. He loved the outdoors. Especially driving up to Gatineau Park and watching the hawks at Champlain Lookout. He was the funniest person I’ve ever known. We laughed a lot. I know things ended horribly, but we had good times in my family, too.”
“He sounds like a great guy.”
“He was,” she says. “I’ve come to realize that he’s probably the only person who ever really understood me or accepted me for what I am. I thought I understood him, too. But there’s so much I didn’t know. Sometimes I think I didn’t really know him at all, and now it’s too late.”
“You knew him,” Hawthorn tells her. “Don’t torture yourself like that.”
“Either way, our connection’s gone, and I keep searching for it, but all I find is this awful silence.” She looks up. “Sequoia was your twin. You two were close. It sounds like she was your person in the same way Sunil was mine. So, how do you manage it?”
“Manage what?”
“Living without your person?”
He releases a long exhale. “I don’t have all the answers, friend. I’m all holes too.”
For a while, they sit and listen to the sound of the thickening snow gently tap against the window. The warmth of the tea eases the strain in her throat and soon her tears recede like tideline.
“It feels good to sit and talk with you,” she says. “I felt the same way after the meeting. I was so nervous before, though, I almost didn’t go. But I’m glad I did.”
“Now that you’ve had some time to digest it all, how did you find your first meeting?”
“It was intense. When we were in the circle, I was shaking. I felt so exposed. I was scared of being judged. I guess that’s happened a lot lately. But after, when everyone was so receptive and kind, I felt relieved. This morning, though, I felt like crap. And I had terrible nightmares last night. Now I know what you mean by a therapy hangover.”
“Consider your initiation complete.” He pauses, thinking. “Group’s complicated that way. You share your pain, which can be great, but you also open yourself up to the pain of others, and there’s no telling what you’re going to get or how it’s going to affect you. I guess for those of us that stick with it, the benefits outweigh the costs. But it’s not for everyone.”
“I can see why.”
He hesitates for a moment. “I noticed that your husband wasn’t there last night. Do you think he’ll come to the next one?”
“I tried to include him. I thought it might help us communicate. But he wasn’t interested. Talking isn’t really his thing. Lots of people are like that, though. It’s not his fault. It’s just how he was raised. I know because I was raised like that, too. He said he doesn’t need group, but he supports me going.”
“He just doesn’t want to have to be there.”
“Something like that.”
“That sounds lonely.”
“I suppose it is.”
The awkwardness of this admission makes Kavita almost fidget. Thankfully, Hawthorn diffuses the tension by declaring, “I think these mugs could use a little warming up.”
He pours hot water into their cups and sits back down. Then he pushes up the sleeve of his sweater, exposing the yin/yang tattoo underneath.
“I told you I got this about six months after Sequoia died.” He extends his inner forearm toward her so she can get a closer look. “I remember lying on the couch watching a movie. I don’t remember which one anymore. But I can still picture the scene that got to me. The characters were all dressed in black, standing around a grave. As they left the cemetery, it hit me that the tombstone was one of the only things that testified to the dead person’s existence, and there it was, off to the side, in the cemetery. I realized I still had my whole life to live. I was going to meet new people and they would never get to know Sequoia. I couldn’t stand that idea. She’s a part of me. My other half. So, I got this tattoo. I think of it as a tombstone on my arm. It’s my way of testifying to the world about Sequoia’s life. It’s how I stay true to my inner skin.”
“Your inner skin? I’m not sure I understand.”
“There’s my outer skin, that the world sees, and knows about me. And then there’s my inner skin, that only I see, and know about myself. That’s where Sequoia lives now. That’s where I keep her safe. The tattoo reminds me that I’m not moving on as I live my life, like every idiot says you should do, because moving on implies leaving her behind. I’ll never do that. I might have lost my twin, but I’m moving with her. I’m carrying her along as I go. The tattoo helps my outer skin match my inner skin, at least a little.”
Kavita traces the tattoo with her gaze, the curved teardrops joined at the middle, absorbing every curve, shade, and bit of negative space.
“Maybe you need to find your own way of testifying to Sunil’s life, too.”
“You mean get a tattoo? I’m afraid of needles.”
“No ink, then.” He chuckles. “What I mean is, maybe you need to find a way of inviting him back into your life. I was a lot less lonely once I started inviting Sequoia back into mine. My sister might be on the other side, but I still have a sister, if you get what I mean.”
“Rediscovering our relationship sounds a little ambitious, considering I’m still mourning the one we lost.”
“Your relationship’s changed, but it isn’t over.”
“Yes, it is,” she mutters. Anchor pulls. “It’s gone. And it’s my fault.”
“That’s just your broken heart talking.” Hawthorn dunks his tea bag. “I remember that place. Thinking life was over. That I was a failure. That I’d failed Sequoia. I felt guilty about everything. I barely ate because Sequoia couldn’t eat. I wouldn’t see my friends because Sequoia couldn’t see hers. For a while, I didn’t even think it was right to laugh because she couldn’t laugh anymore. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was slowly choking myself off. I was squeezing the life right out of myself, a little more each day.”
“I can’t even get a haircut.”
“How do you think mine got so long?” he jokes. “But after a while, I finally understood that I wasn’t honouring her memory, or showing her loyalty. I was punishing myself. I had decided, subconsciously, that if she couldn’t live, then I wouldn’t either. I would just get by until it was over.”
Kavita blinks into her tea.
“How long is it going to last? Another year? Five? What’s it going to take for you to stop punishing yourself?”
She looks up, unprepared for this question. “If I’m honest, I can’t see an end to it.”
“Forever’s a long time, friend.”
She peers into her tea, not seeing. Anchor pulls, pulls, pulls.
“It’s not your fault, Kavita,” he tells her, slow and deliberate, as if trying to convince her.
“Look, I know what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to make me feel better. But I don’t want to feel better about this. Okay? I don’t deserve to feel better about this. I messed up. And it cost my brother his life. That’s the truth. I have to live with it.”
“I felt the same way for a long time. But it’s like Brenda said last night. We did the best we could at the time. If we could have saved our siblings, we would have. We didn’t want them to die.”
“Don’t you feel like you’re letting yourself off the hook?”
“Maybe,” he shrugs. “Mostly, though, I’ve accepted my limitations. I can’t go back in time. I can’t read minds. I couldn’t take Sequoia’s illness onto myself. I couldn’t save her. I wanted to more than anything. Even now, it’s what I want more than anything. It always will be. But all my love and good intentions and regret don’t change a thing. There’s no way to undo this. Not the damage she did to herself or the damage she unknowingly did to us. So, in order to live my life, and face all the decades ahead of me, I’ve had to accept the choice she made. That doesn’t mean I agree with it even remotely. It doesn’t lessen the pain whenever I think about her and how she died. It doesn’t change the fact that I wish she’d believed in her resilience as much as I did, and made a different choice. It just means I accept that I can’t change what happened. She made a choice from a place of pain, hoping the pain would end, but it didn’t. I don’t have the power to change any of that.”
“Well, that’s a lot to accept.”
“People always talk about acceptance like it’s the thing that’ll set you free. To me, it’s been the thing that’s humbled me. At one point, it almost broke me.” He wets his lips. “Listen Kavita, I understand how much you’re hurting. Or at least I know my version of it. If I’ve learned anything from Sequoia, it’s that nothing can grow in that place.”
“Isn’t it wrong to move on without them?”
“We’re not moving on without them.” He places a hand over his tattoo. “With them, right? If our siblings have taught us anything, it’s that we need light.”
“And what if I don’t deserve any?”
“What would your brother say to that?”
“Sometimes I think he’s disappointed in me for not keeping it together. I imagine him looking down on me and all I see is disgust in his eyes. I’m such a mess now.” She rubs her forehead. “He’s never seen me like this. He doesn’t know this person.” She presses her fingers into her sternum. “I’m not sure he’d want to know this person. I’m not sure even I do.”
“He’d know better than anyone what suffering looks like. If he’s looking down on you with anything in his eyes, it’s compassion.”
Kavita peers into Hawthorn’s eyes. They are dark and soft and open. Wells of empathy.
“I hear what you’re saying. And I’m not trying to be resistant. You obviously know what you’re talking about. You’re further along than I am. But I can’t see things the way you do. I’m not sure I ever will.”
“You’re broken-hearted. I get it. I am too. The thing about broken hearts is they’re still open. Wide open. Almost more than they can take. But, still open. It might not seem like it now, but trust me, life slowly starts seeping back in through the cracks. Then one day, you’ll be doing something, and you’ll suddenly realize your life’s taken a new shape. Like it was always meant to.”
“I’m a long way from where I was meant to be. It feels like starting over. I don’t know if I can.”
“Sure. But, I mean, you’re here, aren’t you?” He nudges her knee. “Making a new friend.” His smile is infectiously broad.
“Just like in kindergarten.”
“I’ll remember to bring the Play-Doh next time.”
Pausing, she tucks the blanket underneath her ankles, which ache from resting on the floor for too long. Then she gazes out the window at the snowfall that floats and settles on the front bushes wrapped in burlap. The snowfall transports her back to her childhood, to the forts, the snowball fights, the snow angels, the tobogganing. Sunil always loved winter. Anchor pulls. She feels the impulse. Resists the urge to squeeze. Looks at the Band-Aids covering the scar on her palm.
“Can I show you something?” she asks.
“You bet.” He pulls down the sleeve of his sweater and covers his tattoo.
“Promise not to freak out?”
He raises his hands. “Yogis never freak out.”
“I haven’t shown this to anyone.”
He nods, encouraging her to go on.
She pulls away the Band-Aids. The scab is bark-like and itchy and outlined with pink.
The grin slips from Hawthorn’s lips. “Cooking accident?” He holds her in a steady gaze.
She shakes her head. Feels the unforgiving chill. Observes it. Waits for it to pass. Then she starts replacing the Band-Aids.
“No, don’t,” he says.
He reaches for her hand and gently lifts her palm, holding it with a leaf-light touch. His fingertips are warm from cradling his tea cup. He draws her hand close to his face as he reads the patterns on her skin, those lines that run like roads, and the sinkhole at their centre that breaks them. His warm brea
th sweeps across her skin.
“So,” he says.
“…So.”
“A glimpse of the hurt.”
“Something like that.”
He lets go of her hand and she lowers it onto her lap.
“You know what they say about scars, don’t you?”
She shakes her head.
“They only form on the living. They mean you survived.”
She resticks her Band-Aids.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“What for?”
“I’m just sorry, that’s all.”
“I don’t want your pity. That’s not why I showed you.”
“I wasn’t offering pity.”
“I showed you because in a way this is what led me to group. After what happened, I promised myself to find a better way of coping.”
He grins. “And of course, you have me now, too.”
“I told you I’m not looking for pity.”
“And I told you about my saviour complex.”
“We barely know each other.”
“But in some ways we probably know each other better than our family and friends do.”
He wasn’t wrong.
“My cell number’s on my card. I told you they come in handy.”
A minute or so passes in silence and tea sipping and window gazing. “You know how earlier you talked about life taking shape again?”
He nods.
“I think someday I’d like to find a way of helping people, the way you and Brenda do. I’m not sure how yet. But it would be comforting to know something good’s come out of all this pain.”
“I’ve thought about it, and in the end, I think all this pain goes back to love. We grieve the deepest for the ones we’ve loved the most. In a sense, grief isn’t possible without love. And love isn’t possible without grief. They’re like fraternal twins of a different kind, I guess.”
Like Yama and Yami. “I’ve never thought about it like that.”
“I guess it’s a matter of perspective. Which reminds me, I owe you a book.” He rises and approaches the antique bookcase beside the desk. “Here it is,” he says, as he frees a slim volume from its place on the shelf. Once he finds the page he’s looking for, he hands the book over to her.
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